The Machine That Goes Ping

Ping Trendspotting: Publishers Perish?

Stuart — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:45:21 +0000

From Mathew Ingram at GigaOm: #

While his former publisher released one of his books in several countries, Konrath says they passed on two subsequent titles: the one that they promoted has made about $60,000 in three years, while the two that the publisher decided not to release have brought in four times that amount in just two years. #

Ingram’s article is titled “Memo to publishers: Remind us why you exist again?” And given the way things are going, I’d hate to be a big publishing house these days. If I were to place bets, though, I’d say it’s the big boys that are in the most trouble. There’s still a market for someone to do the tough work of promotion, editing, development, market analysis, and so on. But individual contractors doing that work for successful independent authors seems like a much more sustainable business model in the new economy. #

➤ #

➤ Movie: Moneyball

Stuart — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 22:27:23 +0000

So, I watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes the other night and I thought it was good. 3.5 out of 5 stars at least. Good story, decent acting, great effects. But as I watched it I was kind of thinking to myself that I’m tired of the modern action flick schtick. You know, where there’s just this predictable cadence of violence and motion and effects stitched together with just enough story elements to make it appealing to a broad audience. I wanted to watch something that took its time and developed characters and situations I could genuinely invest in emotionally. #

Moneyball, surprisingly, is exactly that movie. #

I say surprisingly mostly because I read the first couple of chapters of Michael Lewis’s book of the same name, about Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane and his attempt to change the way baseball players are recruited with the help of Peter Brand, a young economist from Yale. The book is very well written, and I’m looking forward to finishing it… but it’s not a movie. What’s surprising is that writers Stan Chervin (story), Steven Zaillian, and Aaron Sorkin (screenplay) turned the raw material of Lewis’s non-fiction book into an engrossing, touching, and inspiring film. The best film about baseball at least since Bull Durham, but also plain and simply an excellent film. #

Director Bennett Miller and Director of Photography Wally Pfister create a palpable sense of being in the back rooms of baseball, of being present with Beane as he struggles to chip away at baseball’s long-held traditions. The movie’s pacing is perfect, and the acting is outstanding. Jonah Hill and Brad Pitt, in particular, deliver first-rate performances. #

You don’t have to love baseball to like this movie. Watch it to see the craft of filmmaking at its best. And, if you need a little inspiration – if you like seeing a risk-taker, an innovator, take on the status quo and make a dent in the universe – you’ll be richly rewarded by spending a couple hours watching Moneyball. #

➤ Information Architecture Defined

Stuart — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:23:13 +0000

I ran across this definition of information architecture at IBM’s developerWorks site and thought I’d share it here: #

Design patterns for information architecture with DITA map domains #

Information architecture #
Information architecture can be summarized as the design discipline that organizes information and its navigation so an audience can acquire knowledge easily and efficiently. For instance, the information architecture of a Web site often provides a hierarchy of Web pages for drilling down from general to detailed information, different types of Web pages for different purposes such as news and documentation, and so on. #
An information architecture is subliminal when it works well. The lack of information architecture is glaring when it works poorly. The user cannot find information or, even worse, cannot recognize or assimilate information when by chance it is encountered. You probably have experience with Web sites that are poorly organized or uneven in their approach, so that conventions learned in one part of the Web site have no application elsewhere. Extracting knowledge from such information resources is exhausting, and users quickly abandon the effort and seek the information elsewhere. #
The same issues apply with equal force to other online information systems, such as help systems. The organization and navigation of the information has a dramatic impact on the user’s ability to acquire knowledge. #

➤ Book: thinking with type, 2nd Edition

Stuart — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 20:12:34 +0000

Size, weight, font selection, alignment, grids, spacing, hierarchy… these are tools for conveying information through text. Each tool imparts meaning in its own way, and a basic understanding of each tool’s subtleties should be part of each information manager’s repertoire. #

In thinking with type, 2nd Edition, Ellen Lupton has crafted an excellent introduction to typography, sketching out the history of the art form and packing in a host of practical examples, definitions, rules to embrace and “type crimes” to avoid. #

Lupton divides the content of her book into three main sections: Letter, Text, and Grid. In each, she gives some historical background, followed by practical rules for applying each element of typography. For instance, in the Letter section, we learn about the development of metal typefaces and their evolution from shapes that emulated the marks that people naturally made on a page, to shapes that were more clearly machine-produced, to those that were created in response to the constraints of digital displays. Lupton then teaches us how to identify parts of a font, how to think about size and scale, how to mix typefaces and how to work with fonts on a screen. #

thinking with type is a very readable book, very well written, and beautifully rendered. I highly recommend it either as an introduction to typography, or as a reference work for the casual designer. #

➤ What to do about Google Reader? (updated)

Stuart — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 22:49:07 +0000

Marco’s blog post today stirred up a lot of feelings for me about Google Reader. The recent visual design changes around Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader haven’t bothered me too much. I don’t think the design is spectacular, but I can live with it. #

What bothers me more is the elimination of features in Google Reader that made it a useful tool for me to both consume information and publish thoughts about the items I was reading. It used to be that I could simply publish interesting posts I found in reader to a dedicated shared Reader feed. Now, Google would like me to use Google Plus instead. #

Now on the one hand, I don’t mind the shift to Google Plus. Plus is an interesting product, with some nifty features. And even though I haven’t used it much to this point, I can see how I might like it more than Twitter or Facebook for talking to a community. On the other hand, the new feature set for Reader makes it painful to incorporate Plus into my news reading workflow. #

Like Marco, I have been using Google Reader as my primary RSS reader for more than 2 years now. After trying out NetNewsWire and several other dedicated readers over the years, I finally came to the conclusion that none of them were as efficient for reading and sharing feeds as Google Reader’s own website on the desktop and on the iPad. RSS readers on the iPad are particularly problematic for me because I subscribe to so many feeds. Starting up an RSS reader on the iPad inevitably requires an interminable wait while the reader fetches the current state of my feeds. Using Google Reader’s iPad-enabled website is much more efficient because it only fetches the data that I need to see at the moment. #

One of the great things about using Google Reader was that it was easy to share items that I thought others might appreciate. On the desktop, I could simply tap shift-S to drop an article into my shared feed, and it was easy to add a note if I wanted to. On the iPad, these features were available to me at a tap. What I ended up with, then, was a lightning-quick way to keep a micro-blog of items that interested me. #

Now, with the Reader redesign, I’m supposed to share blog posts using Google Plus. To do that, I need to click on a non-obvious link at the top of the page. There is no keyboard shortcut available for sharing a blog post with Google Plus. Even worse, on the mobile site, there is no way to share a blog post either to Google Plus or a shared feed with or without a note. The concept of sharing from Google Reader on the iPad doesn’t exist any longer. #

So, what used to be a dead simple keyboard operation now requires copying, pasting, and switching applications (or at least browser tabs). Not to mention that I now have to figure out what stream to share this in. Twitter? Not a lot of room for context or commentary. Plus? Clunky and cluttered. My own blog? Not very efficient, but at least I own it. Delicious or Pinboard? The functionality and ease of posting is there, but that’s not really what those services are intended for. Tumblr? Possibly, but again it’s clunky to get the feeds from Google Reader. #

And I’m not even talking about what I might do on iPad. Other then e-mailing the blog post out of Google Reader, there’s not much that I can do that doesn’t involve a lot of switching apps and copying and pasting. (Perhaps I should give another look at Posterous; that service’s email interface might ease the pain of posting a bit.) #

I have been giving a lot of my online life over to Google over the past few years. Google was the first company to really deliver an information experience that weaved seamlessly from desktop to mobile device and back again. But redesigns like the one we’ve seen with Google Reader remind me that online workflows that depend on big companies and free products are fragile things. I don’t blame Google for doing what they think is right for their business, but I need to seriously reevaluate what parts of my online life are critical for me to manage, and which ones I’m willing to sacrifice when the service provider simply changes their mind about what they value. #

[Update: 11-14-11] Well blow me down. Looks like Google has added a G+ share button at the bottom of each post, where the old Google Reader share button used to be. Still nothing on the iPad mobile version of the site, as far as I can tell, but it’s a step in the right direction. #

Ping Walmart’s $2 Billion Boo-Boo

Stuart — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 23:01:17 +0000

Walmart completely goofs a user-driven change in strategy: #

Put another way, Walmart based this incredibly expensive misadventure on what customers said, rather than what they did. And the customer experience is all about what customers do. In real life. No hypotheticals. Walmart acted without considering the customer experience, and that was a big mistake #

Ouch. Mark Hurst has a good take on this, and he also links to a more detailed post by Phil Terry here. #

➤ #

Ping Three steps back

Stuart — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 05:54:45 +0000

We don’t (yet) have a lot of codified expectations for how computers and applications should act (despite living with them in our homes for the last 30+ years). That’s why we get situations like the one Neven Mrgan describes so perfectly. #

(via Marco) #

➤ #

Ping Organizing the world’s commerce

Stuart — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 16:43:38 +0000

From Doc Searls: #

“The Web is changing from a world wide library with some commercial content to a world wide mall with intellectually interesting publications buried under it, in virtual catacombs.” #

This is why I’ve switched to DuckDuckGo (and occasionally Blekko) for many of my online searches now. Their results are marginally better than Google’s. There’s still a load of crap from content farms to wade through, but I can usually find some quality links through DDG. And DuckDuckGo doesn’t track your search behavior; I like that a lot. #

I’ve been tempted from time to time to quit bookmarking sites in Delicious/Pinboard, thinking I could just Google for anything I needed to find again. But I’m glad I’ve stuck with the habit, because having a stash of pre-vetted links is useful in a way that straight-up search just isn’t. #

➤ #

➤ The Information Management Elevator Pitch Redux

Stuart — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:38:17 +0000

Photo by jaded one – http://flic.kr/p/3JDXL

I just came across some notes I took at this year's orientation for Mid-Career MSIMers. "The Question" came up, as it inevitably does in these kinds of gatherings: What is information management? Here are a few snippets I pulled from the answers back in September.

"The answer needs to be crafted to the person asking the question." – Mike Crandall
"It depends; who are you creating value for? It depends on what YOU want to do with it." – Mario Sanchez
"Information management is a bridge between users and technical implementers, between aspiration and reality, between what's unrealized and what's possible." -Unknown
"We focus on the critical social, psychological, human side of organization systems." – Bob Mason
"We're in the communications business, and our tools are processes as well as technology. We manage the ecology of information." – Bob Larsen
"I achieve results efficiently." – Jason Robertson

Â After a year and a half of study, lots of collaboration, life changes, maturing (a little bit), and a fair bit of rumination on the subject, what are your answers today to that question? What's your elevator pitch these days for information management?

Posted via email from MSIM 2011 #

Ping Microsoft’s core competency

Stuart — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 19:03:49 +0000

“After years of struggling to bring tablets to the masses, it finally looks like our friends over at Microsoft have come up with their iPad killer: a PowerPoint deck! After all, FUD is their core competency.” #

Hilarious. #

➤ #

The Machine That Goes Ping

*Ping* Trendspotting: Publishers Perish?